Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Charles Pierce has endorsed Obama for president because he wants to make "sure that Willard Romney is not president." He says that a third party vote is not really an option because third parties are powerless without proportional voting. And he says that he is not voting for Obama out of fear (presumably of Romney), but because he doesn't have a choice.

This is not "fear" talking. This is simply the way things are. It is important to stand against the people and the forces to which Willard Romney owes his political career. It is more important to do that than it is to do anything else. It is more important to do that than to salve my conscience, or make a statement, or dream my wistful dreams of a better and more noble politics. And that is why, today, I will vote for Barack Obama, not because of the man he is not, but because of the man his opponent clearly has become. I will do so without enthusiasm, and without a sliver of doubt in my mind.

Mr. Pierce will not vote his conscience or use his power to force his party to respond to his wants or try to change politics. He will vote for Obama because Romney and his followers are evil and we should avoid the "fearsome" consequences.

On the other hand, Willard Romney owes even more to the Wall Street crowd, and he owes even more to the military, but he also owes everything he is politically to the snake-handlers and the Bible-bangers, to the Creationist morons and to the people who stalk doctors and glue their heads to the clinic doors, to the reckless plutocrats and to the vote-suppressors, to the Randian fantasts and libertarian fakers, to the closeted and not-so-closeted racists who have been so empowered by the party that has given them a home, to the enemies of science and to the enemies of reason, to the devil's bargain of obvious tactical deceit and to the devil's honoraria of dark, anonymous money, and, ultimately, to those shadowy places in himself wherein Romney sold out who he might actually be to his overweening ambition. It is a fearsome bill to come due for any man, let alone one as mendaciously malleable as the Republican nominee. Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.

Bush jokes about weapons of mass destruction and we were shocked. Obama joked about drone bombings and we ignored it. Bush bails out Wall Street and he's serving his masters; Obama does it and he's saving the country. Romney panders to his base and we are supposed to be afraid; Obama insults and ignores his base and we are supposed to be supportive of him anyway. No matter what we do, we lose.

When you lose even when you win, continuing to play the same game is not the right choice. Mr. Pierce is right; this is simply the way things are. And they will never, ever change, because we do not try to change them. We do what we are told, vote for whomever we are told to vote for, ignore whatever we are told to ignore. Because deep down we know that we do not have a choice. Not in the sense that most people think of the situation, in which we must either vote for Romney or Obama. We don't have a choice because we would have to lose so much more before we started to win, and we are afraid.

We would lose the emotional support of our tribe, our friends and family and ideological allies. They will turn on us with all the means at their disposal and immediately cast us out of the tribe, as loudly and viciously as they can.

We will lose money. The pundits would lose financial support from the party and donations from ideological supporters. We would lose even more jobs, even more services.. We would see more of the burden of supporting society shift onto our middle class shoulders.

We would lose our feeling of superiority and hope for our future. If we acknowledge that were are victims of the rich we admit we are powerless, that we are likely to become more poor and miserable, kill more foreigners, die sooner in a dirty and hot planet that cannot support our lifestyle anymore. We would have to look at our children and think, you might die sooner because of my choices. You might not be able to have a future, a family, a decent life. This is unendurable.

We would lose our sense of security. If we ignore Obama's drone wars we can ignore the fear that one day those drones will be used against us, that they will patrol our cities from the sky recording everything we do just as Obama now patrols our communications, recording everything we say. That the police state, which now ensures no massive protests will ever get off the ground will also ensure that we are never able to fight back in any way. We would watch the iron fist discard the velvet glove, and feel the oppression that only the victims of our success now feel. We would all become Muslims, and our worst nightmare has always been that one day we would be treated as we treated others; the Native Americans, Blacks, foreigners, the very poor, women, children.

But in the end, after we have fought and lost and fought again, we would win. We are The People and our elite are afraid of us. The only thing keeping them alive is our complicity, our unspoken agreement to let them do whatever they want to us as long as we can go on dreaming and pretending that things will get better even if we do nothing to make them better but fill out a ballot every few years.

We will not fight, however. We are afraid. We are terrified. And we will do anything, no matter how much it hurts us later, to pretend we are not.

Monday, October 29, 2012

There is an amazing interview with Greg Palast at therealnews.com, in which he describes some of the fanatical Koch family's history of subverting democracy. Palast describes how "Charles Koch personally ordered the pilfering of oil" royalties from Native Americans.

But the most interesting thing was my question: why? He was already a multibillionaire at the time. And so the amount of oil being stolen, you have to understand, is a few hundred bucks from a family from each of these native families, and they get some royalties. I said, why, but one of his executives asked the same question, why. And we know his answer because his executives were wired. And on the tape he said, I want my fair share, and that's all of it. This is the Koch brothers.

Their father was multi-millionaire Fred Koch, one of the founders of the John Birch Society, who became terrified of communism while working in Russia. His fear became fanaticism.

He claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America," and that "Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment a vicious race war." [19]

And he raised his children to be fanatical as well, in their own way. This world belongs to the strong, the wealthy. They own it, they want it, and they will get what they want, because nothing will stop them. Palast says that the law does not stop them because they have the laws rewritten to benefit themselves. The law belongs to them, it is their weapon and the source of much of their power. It is a terrible mistake to ignore violations of the rule of law that do not affect you. Those violations are warning signs of what is to come, the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

If your friends are violating the law and getting away with it, just imagine how much more your enemies are violating the law and getting away with it. But the two groups must turn a blind eye to each other so they can continue their once-illegal practices, so Obama refuses to prosecute Republicans for their crimes and Republicans pretend that Obama is their ideological enemy. That giant hue and cry over socialism neatly prevented conservatives from observing that Obama was helping Wall Street over Main Street.

At that point [2010], there was this little group called Citizens United, which somehow hired the most expensive lawyer in the United States, Ted Olsen, to argue their case at the Supreme Court. But no one asked, how did they get Ted Olsen? He didn't volunteer. He was given leave from his day job as general counsel for Koch Industries. So Koch Industries, this was the way that Koch Industries—.

JAY: Which frees the Koch Brothers, in this election, to spend whatever they want.

PALAST: Right. And not only that, but (very important) it decriminalized their prior behavior. The Kochs were always giving money through Koch Industries, but it was criminal. They just decriminalized it. So it's not just what they could do now, but that they got away with their—basically, any attempt at bringing them to justice before.

And I want to give credit to a Republican senator, Fred Thompson—remember Mr. Law and Order, the guy who plays a federal prosecutor on Law and Order? As you'll see in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Fred Thompson wanted to blow the whistle on the Koch brothers, even though he was a Republican, 'cause I guess he took playing the part of a prosecutor kind of seriously, right? And he was told by Trent Lott, then the senator, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, back off, and his investigation was shut down. And why didn't the Democrats, who knew all about it, scream bloody murder?

JAY: Yeah, why?

PALAST: One did, and it's ["dik@n'sini], but they got—he told me the Koch brothers got him. That's when the Keating Five—he was smeared. And he said the Koch brothers were behind him losing his seat, 'cause he wanted to bring up this issue. But Fred Thompson, a Republican, shut it down.

And the Democrats didn't complain, because it was a trade, it was a deal, as you'll read—and true-blue democrats might be upset to hear this, but Bill Clinton apparently had taken not a small amount of change from his billionaires, called the Riady family. They're not American citizens. He met 95 times with them in the White House. That means he met with Chinese billionaires more often than his own daughter, Chelsea. And he—apparently, money went into the Clinton campaign and other favors were done by the Riadys, big favors for the Clintons. That's a real impeachable offense. Forget the stains-on-dresses stuff. This was really impeachable. And Trent Lott told Senator Thompson, we don't do the Riadys and Clinton, and they don't do the Kochs. So it was a billionaire trade. And that's how the game's played.

JAY: Okay. More of this is all in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. And if you want to get more detail on this and much more like it, it's in the book.

People tell themselves that things won't get worse, that they have a president on their side who will hear their concerns and act on them, that they can work from inside to change the establishment. But it's too late. They refused to admit that their leaders were typical authoritarian leaders who believe that they do not have to follow the rules, have no empathy for anyone not like them, and will not stop their endless grab for more power. Power is a verb. It is an action. To truly have power you must use it, see it in action, inflict it on those weaker than you, who are everyone else in your kingdom. You must make others suffer to prove that you have all the power. The suffering of the poor is music to your ears, because it means you are superior, you are rewarded by God, you are one of the chosen ones, you are worthy and everyone else is not.

The poor and middle class let themselves be mistreated, which proves that they are weak and therefore immoral, since immorality is a sign of human weakness and the legacy of Original Sin. Suffering is pleasing to God, encourages morality, is a sign of obedience. It is a very, very good thing, and Koch Industries is here to make sure that good things happen to everyone.

Especially the Koches. They want it all, it belongs to them. The workers and the rivers, the fields and the politicians, the money and the power. They took billions from the 90% and they will take billions from the 9%.

The "Shorter Ross Douthat" formula is far kinder than Douthat deserves. His article is a laundry list of right-wing daily outrages such as the Julia slide show, Sandra Fluke and Lena Dunham. Douthat is duly incensed that Obama sinks to pandering to women by reminding them who is the lesser evil.

But given the way Obama’s once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow’s feminists may look back on his campaign’s pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one.

Douthat's link leads to an unsourced Politico article. Recent polls say Obama's numbers have risen among men and, more important, are still higher than Romney's in swing states. Elites are funny people; they are so accustomed to being told that they are leaders and bred for greatness that they tend to underestimate everyone else. Douthat and others (cough:McArdlecough) assume that their readers will either not read the links, not understand the links, or not care if the links contradict their article.

Douthat attempts to manipulate the poor, weak dears by telling them that Obama is oppressing them with his maleness and sexuality and condescending belief that he knows what is best for them.

This paternalistic pitch assumes that liberalism’s traditional edge with women is built mostly on social issues, and that Democrats — especially male Democrats — win when they run as protectors of the sexual revolution, standing between their female constituents and the Todd Akins of the Republican Party.

Douthat goes on to say that women have always preferred the Democratic party because they are communal, no doubt because they are motherly and nurturing and cannot deny their biological imperative to cling to a man and bear his children. Men, Douthat says, are individualist--ruggedly so, no doubt--and therefore support Republicans, which contradicts the latest poll information.

An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney’s line about “binders full of women” — in a tight-as-a-tick, economy-centric election, this is the message that Obama is relying on to push him back over the top.

Perhaps it will actually work. Perhaps the Electoral College will save the president. But I’ll just say this: It’s awfully hard to imagine Hillary Clinton closing out a campaign this way.

It's just a coincidence that the Catholic Church has allied itself with the Republican party, and it doesn't matter what Mitt says because he takes both sides of every issue, depending on whom he is talking to.

This isn't the first time Douthat has attempted to use an enemy's strength against him. Predictably, chaos ensued, because Douthat is a mediocre hack who thinks he commands great persuasive powers over the foolish masses. He's unable to use Obama's real weakness against him; namely, that despite the fact that Democrats elected a Democratic president, legislature aiming to limit abortions still sky-rocketed, and that Obama refused to offer Plan B over the counter to girls under 17, the ages most likely to get impregnated by incest.

The right can't attack Obama on his many abuses because they approve of them, and thus they will probably lose to a man that they despise so much they can't even see how much he agrees with them.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Dinesh D'Souza has outed himself as a world-class wanker, something everyone already knows but D'Souza inexplicably thought he could hide in plain sight. And speaking of hiding things in places one should not, it seems married uber-Christian D'Souza was caught sleeping with a married woman in her late twenties while at a Christian conference.

The young lady in question, Denise Joseph, a right-wing blogger,married Dec. 30, 2011, but by September D'Souza was introducing her as his fiancee. D'Souza said they met three months ago so it was truly a whirlwind courtship; from first meeting to fiancee in only two months. However a former D'Souza staffer at The King's College, where D'Souza was president until the scandal hit, begged to differ with D'Souza's account. The Daily Beast says that Joseph has been seen at the college since "early 2012":

A former student said people would ask about Joseph, whom he described as “pushy,” but would be met with “weird smiles” and evasive answers. That student said one of his friends, a staffer who worked closely with D’Souza, was tasked with creating an official response to the speculation, which was that she was “a good friend of Dinesh.” The student said staffers he knew believed Joseph made her presence known at the college because she wanted to be more than D’Souza’s “road tail.”

If this account is true Joseph was a newlywed when D'Souza scooped her up. D'Souza told the Evangelical magazine World, which broke the story, that Joseph was his fiance and they had spent the night together in his hotel room at the conference but that "nothing happened." He also told World that he and his wife were divorcing but he did not file for divorce until reporters started contacting him regarding this story. As the story grew and he was forced to resign his presidency, D'Souza "went on the attack," accusing the conferences organizer who witnessed D'Souza and Joseph get one hotel room together and the owner of World, as liars. He claims vendetta, since he had ended World vice president's editorial consultant contract with The King's College.

"The approach in the article ... is a clear effort to destroy me and my career," D'Souza said. "To me, that is a kind of viciousness masquerading as righteousness. That's what makes this deplorable and sad."

Smith said any speculation that World published its report as a vendetta against D'Souza and TKC is irresponsible.

"It is simply not true," Smith said. "It's a story we did not pursue, but once we came across it, we made a pretty straightforward journalistic determination that this is a newsworthy story."

Smith said conference organizers McFarland and Tony Beam observed D'Souza's "highly irregular" behavior and shared the information with Smith, who was speaking at the same event.

So the morals police at the evangelical conference in South Carolina ran tattling to World magazine because baby Jesus weeps every time a man sins, and a man who makes a living peddling hypocrisy is hoist in his own double standard. D'Souza now claims that Joseph did not share his room, the two did not sleep together, and for the life of him, D'Souza just can't imagine why any Christian would be upset by his actions anyway.

Denise and I were trying to do the right thing. I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings. Obviously I would not have introduced Denise as my fiancé at a Christian apologetics conference if I had thought or known I was doing something wrong. But as a result of all this, and to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, Denise and I have decided to suspend our engagement.

Obviously! Why on earth would anyone expect the religious right to get upset by the sight of D'Souza cohabiting with a young woman not his wife? It's not like they and D'Souza preach constantly about morality.

Why is Obama on the social issues — and I’m thinking here of abortion, I’m thinking here of gay marriage — why is Obama so aggressive in attacking the traditional values agenda? I think the reason for it is because when Obama thinks about colonialism, about the British and the French who went abroad to conquer other countries, or earlier the Spanish and the Portuguese, I come from a part of India that was a Portuguese colony at one time, I think for Obama colonialism is identified not just with the soldiers but also with the missionaries. Remember it’s the missionaries that went alongside the conquerors, the conquistadors, came to the Americas and worked on converting the Indians and later missionaries went to China, India and Japan. So I think this is the problem, Obama doesn’t like traditional Christianity because he identifies it with colonialism. Obama’s own Christianity is more of a Third World liberation theology, a very different kind of Jeremiah Wright type philosophy, summarized in the idea that America is the rogue nation in the world.

Oh, wait. They do. Especially when they can make lots of money by lecturing about Obama's so-called anti-Christian beliefs and actions.

Happily, the future looks bright for the new couple, since the young lady is every bit as hypocritical as her paramour. Right Wing Watch helpfully excerpted a portion of Joseph's now-invisible personal blog, where she rails against those nasty liberals who are destroying marriage with infidelity.

In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists and liberals of other stripes started pointing out the hypocrisies of what they termed “patriarchy.” Time and again, they urged us to recognize human’s natural “animal instincts” in relation to traditional morality and therefore, to reject traditional institutions such as marriage as outdated because now these intellectual elites had things like biology and sociology, things like women’s studies, gender studies, and critical race theory, to back them up. They pointed to infidelity or infamous sexual desire surveys (conducted by homosexuals)[vi] among traditionally married couples to “prove” their theses. Limb by limb, they tore the traditional family to shreds until they reduced us to the shining bastion of zoological (but even animals aren’t this bad and do not depend on the state to care for them)cesspool equality that we have now in every American ghetto and which is seeping out into the middle and upper classes in less animated ways. These people, like their European counterparts, are the ones who will go extinct. For instance, we have raised an entire generation of boys who, permanently scarred by their parents’ divorces(perhaps over issues such as infidelity) cannot emotionally connect or commit to any one woman in any meaningful way and so we also have an entire generation of girls for whom that coveted diamond solitaire comes later and later in life, with more and more contractual caveats (prenups). Somehow, when it happens after 5 years of living together, after 1 year of non-exclusive dating followed by another 3 years of recurring breakups over the male’s unwillingness to “commit,” getting that ring for which you girls will surely be paying your hard-earned half, doesn’t feel quite like the fairytale it used to.

No doubt that coveted diamond solitaire will eventually make its way onto Joseph's finger, courtesy of millions of gullible right-wingers who buy D'Souza's products. And is there any doubt that it will be a much bigger diamond that that of the first (of many!) Mrs. Dinesh D'Souzas?

Friday, October 5, 2012

While I have been neglecting the question of authoritarianism and morality in politics I also have been neglecting my other duty, keeping an eye on Megan McArdle so you don't have to. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out that McArdle has snuggled down onto her new little perch, where she recommences to feather her nest and peck at any lice that might prevent her from doing what she does best, letting Megan be Megan.

The Benefits of Business Experience by Mrs. Megan McArdle, national celebrity and expert on failure and how to turn it to your advantage, as will be related in her new book Permission To Suck. Not that she needs it!

It's not crazy to worry that Obama hasn't got it.

Why are filthy-rich hedge fund managers, so enamored of Obama in the 2008 race, turning on him now? I endorse the rhetorical explanation: Barack Obama has made a habit of bashing financial types and rich people. Bankers and rich people, being people, do not like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces. So they are naturally disinclined to support him. I am shocked at how many New Yorkers I had thought to be rock-ribbed Democrats are attending Romney fundraisers. Not a huge number, mind you; it's not like they're going to tip New York from blue to red. But if any New Yorkers of my acquaintance were attending GOP fundraisers in the past, they certainly weren't admitting it in public, unless they already worked for National Review. So it does seem like a real change . . . and what they say when I ask them is that, well, they don't like being treated as villains in Obama's campaign set pieces.

Only a fake like McArdle could be a success in journalism without mastering that little thing call attribution. Salmon named some billionaires, why will McArdle not defend them by name? Who are the "rock-ribbed Democrats"? Here, also, is where things get a little fuzzy. It seems that either New Yorkers of McArdle's acquaintance are all hedge fund managers or all of McArdle's acquaintances think exactly like hedge fund managers. Since McArdle has a history friendship with a wide circle of DC libertarian and somewhat liberal bloggers and New York liberals, it turns out that lots and lots of people think just like hedge fund managers. Who knew?

Furthermore, we are supposed to believe that "rock-ribbed Democrats" are now attending Romney fundraisers, which means they are already contributing to his campaign and might contribute more. Anyone who has been reading the left bloggers recently will notice that rock-ribbed Democrats wouldn't vote for Romney if you held murdered babies over their heads. So to speak.

Megan McArdle: Mr. Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager! I am so very surprised to see you at this fundraiser!

Rock-Ribbed Democratic Hedge Fund Manager: Well, you know how it goes, Megan. All your beliefs go out the window when you hear your president deliver a few lukewarm populist statements in an election year. Some people might think we would be delighted with laws that cater to our needs, bank bailouts, a healthy stock market, and enormous rise in income equality but we know different. Barack Obama was in the White House for years but he never did anything with it.

It's entirely possible--nay, probable--that the hedge fund managers are still whining about mean old man Obama who told them to get off his lawn, as Felix Salmon relates in the post linked below, but it is impossible to determine the facts when none are offered. We must just suppose that as Megan McArdle's acquaintances go, so goes the world. The only real new information we are given is that McArdle hobnobs with hedge fund billionaires or at the very least people who think like them, which is, no doubt, central to her point.

There’s a limit to how far you can go asking people to justify their Hitler analogies, so Chrystia asks Cooperman about his “never worked a day in his life” comment. It turns out that by “working”, Cooper means that Obama “never made payroll. He’s never built anything”. In other words, this is very much the Romney version of the great-men-of-history worldview: one where a handful of visionary builders use their skills to create jobs for the masses and wealth for themselves. Recall Nick Lemann, profiling Romney in last week’s New Yorker:

He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company — Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s — it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero.

If you’re the billionaire principal of a business you built yourself, then you are very likely to see the world through this lens — and as a result, you’re very likely to be very supportive of Romney’s candidacy.

Felix implies that there is something faintly ridiculous about this.

Who's that shyly peeping out from beneath McArdle's skirt? Why I do believe it is Ms. Ayn Rand, tireless* purveyor of the great-man-of-history worldview and Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle's philosophical hero. McArdle is much too afraid modest to admit to being a Randian since the intellectual elite ridicule the poor quality of Rand's work, but McArdle's desire to worship the elite is obvious.

I myself am on the record as saying that being a CEO does not make you a good president. And yet, I do think there is something to this complaint.

First and most of all, any discussion of a CEO presidency must immediately address the subject of Bush, Geo. W., who just a few years ago spent eight years as president of these United States, well within the memory span of Ms. McArdle, who is nearly 40. Bush was celebrated as our CEO president and we all know how that turned out. Yet McArdle utterly ignores Bush and the little fact that Romney's business experience was in vulture capitalism, not manufacturing or retail. He ran a chop shop for rich men, which is business experience of a sort but not the kind you want to use when running a country. And according to McArdle, she chose Bush 2004 not because he was a CEO president, but because she was afraid Kerry would nationalize health care and "cut and run" in Iraq. In fact:

I don't think the president has much, if anything, to do with how the economy runs, unless he's one of those disastrous tinkerers, like FDR and Richard Nixon. Neither of the current candidates is such a lackwit, meaning that their impact on the economy will be minimal indeed. Neither candidate gets my vote here.

Obama was a low-level editor in Reference Services, working on reports describing economic conditions in various foreign countries.

By all accounts, he disliked the work, not just because it was pedestrian and boring, but because it was in business. "He calls it working for the enemy," Obama's mother, Ann, wrote after a phone conversation with her son, "because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in [Third World] countries."

Of course, we've had many good presidents with no business experience. But Obama's whole administration tends to be light on people from outside the academia--NGO--government triangle. It's something that's increasingly true of Washington in general--and, I think, increasingly problematic.

McArdle's head is so firmly fixed up her gargantuan copy of Atlas Shrugged that she can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Just as conservatives cannot leave the happy Land of Imagination in which they are the respected inheritors and protectors of western civilization, McArdle's libertarian fantasy world is a Willy Wonka candyland of boot-strapping men and women who built noble industries with the sweat of their brow and a handful of beans. These Randian Ubermenschen suffer horribly from the depredations of the effete, elite intelligentsia, who all want to destroy the rich to compensate for their own inadequacy. Only by understanding McArdle's point of view, a wandering mishmash of anecdotes, personal biography and economic hero worship, can one even begin to make sense of this post.

Let's join her as she defends her noble captains of industry, who must steer the ship of state safely between the rocky shoals of liberal extravagance and wind-swept waves of conservative meddling. To do this we must immediately jump from poor, persecuted hedge fund managers to mid-management company employees, two creatures who have little in common, but it takes very little imagination to conclude that McArdle wants to imbue the financial elite with the virtues of the middle class businessman to make the former seem a little less like Whiny, Sleazy and Greedy, three of the Seven Dwarfs of capitalism.

I have now worked in journalism for (gulp) almost ten years, longer than I've done anything else. But before I worked in journalism, I had permanent, full time jobs as a secretary, a help desk technician, an admin at a corporate training firm, and some higher-level jobs designing and building networks for financial clients.

I don't think "permanent" means what she thinks it means. Perhaps she meant to say that she considered these jobs as permanent, which would be most unusual for someone as educated, ambitious and indebted as McArdle. Still, one hesitates to call a lady a liar over such a small thing. Although it is also difficult to understand how a secretary or help desk technician gained the ability to assess CEOs. Her professors must have covered such things in business school but they were academics, and as McArdle tell us quite often, academics know nothing. Or everything.

When I was unemployed in New York, I started developing my own technology consulting business for small firms, with all that implies in the way of paying taxes and going on sales calls and managing cash flow.

Since McArdle has said that she was desperately poor while being provided with room and board by her parents on the Upper West Side of New York, one surmises that the business was not successful, and therefore perhaps McArdle's understanding of business experience might not be the same as that of a CEO or even presidential candidate.

I also, as long-time readers know, spent a year doing administrative work in a construction trailer down at Ground Zero.

She ran the copy machine.

These were not jobs that were designed to season young people before moving them up, nor waystops for same; they were mostly permanent jobs, whose main focus was on making customers happy, not nurturing tomorrow's elite. (And indeed, probably half my co-workers had either never attended college, or never finished.) We measured our results in profit and loss, not newspaper writeups or web links.

So these lower level jobs did not lead to high advancement. This will be important later.

When I look at a lot of what gets written these days, I see how valuable that is. I'm not claiming that my work experience was all that comprehensive, and as an entrepreneur, I wasn't much of an entrepreneur. But what it does give me is some exposure to the legions of people who labor their whole lives at jobs that are kinda fine--and at least a little inkling about how companies, and company managers, think. Which is often not at all how the policy elites with whom I am now surrounded seem to think that they think.

To peddle Myth #1, McArdle must peddle Myth #2: Academics are all liberal obsessed with white guilt and all government workers are incompetents who just want to keep their jobs. Like teachers. And running a shoe store or small factory is just like running the country.

The increasingly mandarin elite, hygienically removed from the grubby business of scrounging for customers, frequently seems to have no idea at all what goes on in companies. Stop grinning, Republicans; I mean you too. Yes, too many liberals seem to believe that all infelicitous market outcomes can be cured by appointing a commission composed of really top-notch academics--during the debate over health care reform, the words "peer reviewed study" were invoked by supporters with no less touching a faith than an Italian grandmother performing a rosary for the salvation of the godless Communists.

I haven't seen "mandarin elite" since I last read The Corner. McArdle is still bitter over her loss now that "Obamacare" has been enacted. She did not notice that the right wrote the plan, the medical insurance industry favored the plan, and the insurance industry was given a huge bonus, as people who would be forced to drop insurance as the economy worsens will now be forced to keep it. She is also bitter that all that Koch money couldn't buy her tribe academic respectability and copious cosy jobs but that is what conspicuous consumption is for.

On the other hand, here comes the GOP claiming that entrepreneurship can be started or stopped with small changes in marginal tax rates, as if one were turning on and off a light. This is no less of a technocratic fallacy, even if, as with many technocratic fallacies, there is a grain of sound theory buried somewhere under that towering mountain of unwarranted assumptions.

Yes, conservatives sure are stupid, but they do have some right ideas, such as cutting taxes on the rich. But academics are even more stupid because they think they know how to run companies when they really don't and just muck up everything with their meddling instead. Which makes Paul Krugman either Fred, Shaggy or Scooby, I believe.

The result is that companies usually get treated as a rather simple variable in a model rather than the complex organizations they are. For example, you see people reasoning from corporate behavior to efficacy: if fast food companies spend a lot of money on advertising, then said advertising must make kids eat more fast food; if hiring managers demand a college degree for positions that didn't used to require one, there must be a good business reason. "They wouldn't do it," says the argument, "if it didn't work."

If you've actually worked at a company, this is a ludicrous statement. Companies do stuff that doesn't work all the time, and it can take decades to unwind even the stupidest expenditures and rules.

If companies do stupid things all the time why would we want a businessman/CEO type running the country? Or is McArdle telling us again that the only road to success is through failure?

And I had no idea that corporate advertising was stupid because it didn't work. Why on earth have corporations spent so many millions on advertising that doesn't work? Why do politicians do the same? Has anyone ever told the advertising industry this, or have they just been laughing up their sleeves at everyone all this time? Mad Men? You mean Malevolent Men!

More importantly, when they do have good reasons, they are often not the reasons that outsiders think. The elite projects their own concerns onto the company, instead of asking the company what it's worried about.

This is a sterling example of why people call McArdle an idiot. Academics, who are all elites you know, should be asking CEOs and other businessmen what the latter are worried about, so they can put their thinky minds to work solving the business problems. (Just as employees should be worrying about what their bosses need instead of worrying their pretty little heads about stuff like wages and working conditions.) Instead of doing silly academic exercises like studying inflation or depressions or Keynsian economics they should be figuring out how to get people to buy more stuff.

Take advertising. Some of it aims to increase consumption of a product; the "Got Milk?" campaign is a famous example. But that doesn't mean it works--the Got Milk? campaign,which went nationwide in 1995, doesn't look to me like it had much lasting impact on milk sales.

Actually, if you look at the link you will see that milk sales stopped falling, the reason for the campaign in the first place, and ended up higher than before the campaign. If you read the history of the Got Milk campaign, which is very interesting, you will see that it was a California campaign meant to increase California milk consumption, which it did while becoming a cultural phenomenon in a small way and winning many awards. All in all, the campaign was tremendously successful.

Yet that doesn't mean it was unsuccessful, because the trade association that paid for it probably did achieve its primary goal: showing members that they were actively promoting the interests of dairy farmers. The members, not milk-buyers, may have been the real "audience" for that campaign.

Just like her father, who was managing director for the trade association of New York city construction companies called General Contractors Association. Evidently he was wasting his time by pretending to actively promote their interests while he really just wanted to milk them of a high salary instead. In fact, he is very much an example of the "academia--NGO--government triangle" that McArdle was discussing earlier but moved from government to private practice to academia and back again, not NGOs. It's odd that McArdle ignored the famous revolving door between business and government. Maybe it just slipped her mind. However we know he provided service in return for his high pay, contra McArdle, when the government investigated organized crime's role in construction.

Commenting on Mr. Goldstock’s [director of the state’s Organized Crime Task Force] findings , the managing director of the General
Contractors Association, Francis X. McArdle, said he was ”unaware of any
pervasive patterns of corruption” regarding his group. The association
represents more than 100 contractors primarily engaged in construction of public
buildings and plants.

Mr. McArdle also disputed the need for a new investigative agency. ”We don’t
need more people tripping over each other in search of glory, facts or
whatever,” he said.

Like father, like daughter. Who needs to find out why banks fail or mortgage companies break the law? Things just happen and there's no villains and there's nothing we can do about anything.

But advertising isn't even always aimed at raising consumption. GM does not spend money on car ads because it hopes that many more people will start driving, or that some of them will buy three cars instead of one. The purpose of a car ad is to make people buy your car instead of your competitor's. It's certainly possible that this is how McDonalds thinks about its advertising, but the policy elite isn't worried about McDonalds putting Burger King out of business, it's worried about fat kids.

Let us pause to note that McArdle is complaining that the "policy elite," also known as academics and government officials, care about kids' health instead of McDonald's profits. The bastards. How could their values be so out of wack?

And of course, we shouldn't count out the possibility that companies spend a lot on advertising because they don't know whether it works--and don't dare find out. An immense amount of IT spending is done this way.

If McArdle were actually a real journalist instead of someone who plays on tv she would do some research and find out if she was correct. If she read even one article she would discover that McDonald's spends two billion a year on advertising, that its advertising campaigns have been very successful in increasing sales and encompass everything from movie-tie-in toys in Happy Meals to product placement in movies to lavishing attention and perks on mommy bloggers, and it knows every detail of its advertising campaigns, including efficacy and cost, down to the last dollar.. It's a fascinating tale as McDonald's has such an enormous market share and is a part of American culture, but you will not hear that tale from Miss Megan, who is not one to let facts get in the way of peddling her propaganda.

To recap: we now know that advertising doesn't work because advertisements do not change behavior. Therefore, whenever the "policy elite" "projects their own concerns onto the company," they are doomed to failure. The advertising companies all know they are failures but they want to be paid so they just pretend to do their job. The corporations go along with all of this expensive Kabuki because they are afraid to find out if they are wasting their money.

Which is why we should elect a CEO president, so he can tax the country to pay for services we won't get but are too afraid to find if we will get them or not. I thought we were already doing that.

I'm not claiming that McDonalds advertising doesn't make kids eat more, by the way; I'm just saying that this is a fact which has to be proven on its own merits, not inferred from corporate behavior.

Ah, the classic McArdle double-fake. I didn't say what I just said, I am just saying that it is possible that what I said but did not say is true. If only there were a way to find out....

The flip side of this is the people who think that companies don't do anything at all that couldn't be done better by government or academia . . . except sit back and rake the money in. This is particularly prevalent in discussions of health care, but it frequently pops up elsewhere.

My goodness, it sure is silly to think that national health care could work. And since government can't do anything right, maybe it was a mistake to let it run the war effort in WWII, or the space program, or the NIH or CDC or the highway system or anything else. Because adding a layer of profit to any endeavor is sure to make it cheaper and more efficient.

My favorite in this genre is Jerry Avorn, the professor of pharmacoeconomics who told Ezra Klein that we didn't really need drug companies because now academics with good drug prospects could simply go straight to the capital markets and raise money to fund their own projects.
This is simply breathtakingly wrong. For one thing, venture capitalists want an exit strategy before they will put money in, and in biotech, exit is often a sale to a big pharmaceutical firm; no Big Pharma, no VC funds. And second, few newly hatched biotech firms have the complementary capacities to bring a drug to market by themselves. Forget the sales force; I'm talking about the expertise to get the thing through the FDA approval process and produce it in massive quantities. How do they acquire those capacities? They partner with Big Pharma, or license to them.

I doubt Jerry Avorn would tolerate someone making sweeping statements about what a hypertension drug would do without, say, making a basic investigation into the properties of the cardiovascular system. But among policy elites, there's frequently a reluctance to do this with companies, because the companies are seen as self-interested; spending too much time listening to them will only compromise your objectivity.

"The companies are seen as self-interested." Well, no wonder those elite academics are so confused and are so willing to force their body politic on the innocent, vulnerable billionaires. The government and academia think that businesses are in the business of making money and might even do things are, perhaps, in theory, a little less than altruistic. Which could never happen, and which is why all those rumors of massive pollution in Koch industries could not possibly be true.

At a salon dinner in Washington not long ago,

Ah, yes. The Atlantic salon dinners, in which The Atlantic pimped McArdle out to corporations, who eagerly repeated everything they wanted her to say.

I found myself explaining why so many people go into consulting: it's less exhausting than corporate jobs. One of my friends who went into the management training program at a telecom firm out of business school found himself managing a call center. It's a responsible position, but it's also a little stressful and not always interesting.

"I'm sorry," said one of the other attendees, a very smart and insightful person who writes beautifully and knows a whole lot about economics, "but if you get an MBA from Chicago, and you manage a call center, you're an idiot."

Likewise, anyone who pays $100,000 for an MBA and ends up training to be a fake journalist at the Koches' Institute for Humane Studies must be an idiot as well.

This is pretty much exactly wrong. If you are going to someday be a senior manager at a major telecom firm, you should absolutely manage a call center: nowhere else will you get the kind of hands on experience with the firm's customer base in their most irascible, demanding moments, or learn as much about the company's cost structure and operational challenges. And surely it is not actually idiotic, even for someone with an MBA from a top school, to want to be a senior manager at a major telecom firm?

Didn't McArdle say earlier that the lower level jobs were permanent jobs? And don't most top jobs go to people from top schools with top credentials and top contacts?

And yet, it's such an unsurprisng remark, because this so often seems to me to be the animating spirit of our governing class. The purpose of an elite education, the thinking goes, is to equip you to design and run the system by which 300 million Americans live together--and to ensure that you never, ever have to actually interact with the 280 million who did not graduate from an elite academic program.

McArdle, as always, extrapolates from personal experience.

To be sure, that's a charge that can often be leveled at consulting and finance--the two jobs where Romney got his fortune, and apparently, many of his supporters. But at least the consultants and the bankers have to convince some very non-elite CEOs to give them money, and their non-elite employees to give them information. At least their performance gets measured by a metric that's hard to fudge for very long, or spin into something more pleasing: is there more money in the bank, or less, at the end of the quarter? And the people who do run non-elite, consumer focused small businesses are also disproportionately going for Romney over Obama.

It's like the last four years never happened. No bank failures, no bailouts, no hidden bad investments. Tra-la-la, McArdle skips merrily past the truth and down the garden path.

That same article (on a poll by SurePayroll) also included the following quote:

“It’s deeply concerning that optimism plunged 15 points at a time when we’re struggling to maintain the recovery,” said SurePayroll CEO and President Michael Alter. “This suggests a lack of growth through the election, but what’s more troubling is what it could mean beyond that. When small business owners are not optimistic, they’re not investing and they’re not hiring."

It seems small businessmen lean towards Romney because they are very stupid; they form their business plans around their mental state, not the needs of their business. When small business owners don't have order to fill they don't invest and they don't hire. No matter how pessimistic or optimistic they are, hiring depends on demand, not their mood. McArdle might want to read her source material some time--it's very odd but the material frequently does not support her claims, at least not convincingly. She might want to look into that some time.

This is not to disparage jobs outside of business. I have one. So do most of my friends and family. The people in those jobs work very hard, they are often brilliant, and they even occasionally contribute something positive to the world--something that is hard to say about, say, an associate structuring a really innovative tax-arbitrage deal.

But ultimately, businesses are where all the money comes from to pay for us to opine about the state of the world--present and potential. They are the ones who generate the goods and services, the advertising dollars and tax revenue, that keep the rest of us afloat. It matters that fewer and fewer of us have any real experience at all with how they work. We sit in our air conditioned offices and presume to plan the economy, yet how many of us could keep a trucking firm in business for a whole month, sell a customer on an unfamiliar new generator technology, or turn a lawn-mower repair shop from deficit to profit?

I'll be the first to say that I couldn't. What my time in the private sector gave me is mostly a terrific respect for how hard it is to manage a business, particularly one filled with workers who are doing a job, not pursuing a vocation.

The world appears to be overflowing with academics and journalists who could do a much better job running the Fortune 500 than those grasping yahoos in the C-Suite . . . if only they weren't so busy with their research. But I am not among them. I hate repetitive jobs unless they involve data collation, dislike telling other people what to do, can't stand to make sales calls, and have a low tolerance for the minutiae of management. And so my hat is off to anyone who manages to keep a business in the black. Even if they make a bunch of really stupid mistakes.

When Obama sat down with the auto task force to confront the problems of reorganizing GM, the first thing he asked was "Why can't they make a Corolla?"

There are a lot of answers to that--cost structure, labor practices, the structure of the American car market, the pool of automotive engineering talent available to American manufacturers. But the simplest one is that GM is not Toyota.

Companies are individuals, with individual strengths and weaknesses, and a Car Czar cannot turn one company into another any more than a surgeon could turn you into one of your cousins. To even ask the question seems to reveal immense hubris: why, oh why, has GM not done the obvious and produced what I, in my imperial wisdom, believe to be the car of the future?

I think you can make an argument that consultants and bankers do quite a bit of this, with money and interest rates replacing policy levers. But I also think you can argue that they do somewhat less of it, because at the end of the day, they do have to get in there and deal with an actual company; if sales plummet, it's no good pointing to your model and declaring that it's still working fine.

So when America's sales plummet and America can no longer make payroll, we need a CEO president who will be able to make cold calls to Russia and China to get them to buy our iron ore and guns.

This emphatically does not necessarily mean that Romney will therefore be a great president, or that you should vote for him. I have lots of thoughts on this, but given how long this post is already, I will have to share them on another day. For now, I'll just say that whatever the flaws of Mitt Romney, or the financiers who support him, I think that the worry about Obama's lack of business experience is a fair concern--and that I wish more of our leaders and policy analysts had started their careers in the private sector, seeing how it creates the wealth that they deploy.

We started out talking about hedge fund managers but now we end up with a paean to the workers of the world, or at least the people who hire the workers of the world and create most of America's wealth. Therefore we must vote for Mitt Romney (not that she is telling us to vote for Mitt Romney, mind you) because Obama never ran a Stop-n-Go and therefore has no idea how to run the country, despite the fact that he has been doing just that for years.

People are rightly concerned with McArdle's dishonesty but her biggest problem is that she just isn't very bright.